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Featured Story HPE claims to have beaten Cisco to a proper self-driving network Marvis, described as an AI brain, now unifies all the various parts of the Aruba and Mist portfolios to create a truly autonomous system, says HPE. Singtel considers sovereign AI an opportunity to move up the value chain with differentiated services. Singapore's largest service provider Singtel sees sovereign AI as a potential premium-service opportunity for telecom operators, with the ability to offer services beyond GPU infrastructure, including AI models and intelligent routing. Singtel believes greater control over data, models and infrastructure could help differentiate its offering in an increasingly competitive market. "It's easier for providers like us to build best-in-breed GPUs and infrastructure because we are operating maybe five, 10 or 15 data centers, compared with hyperscalers that operate hundreds or thousands. We can test infrastructure quickly and also offer stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and data-locality guarantees," said Vinod Joseph, Group Vice President - AI and Data Strategy at Singtel, in a panel discussion at FutureNet Asia recently. "However, it is not just about GPUs. We are trying to become more and more relevant up the stack. So, it is not just about GPUs, it is about models, intelligent routing and maintaining context for users. Also, you need to keep in mind about geopolitics… you can't build an entire business around one model or one set of tools. Having a choice of models diversity and continuous evaluation of performance of every model and whether that suits your use case or value that you are trying to derive from has become extremely important. I believe, sovereignty is going to become more and more relevant," Joseph added. Singtel believes sovereign AI is about control and not just about data localization. It wants to retain the ability to process sensitive data locally while allowing other workloads to run outside Singapore. It is also exploring a "hybrid mesh architecture" that combines its own infrastructure with hyperscaler and partner resources, with control points governing data and model usage. The operator is also looking at the ability to redirect workloads between frontier and open-source AI models, giving customers greater flexibility while addressing data-locality requirements. Such capabilities could help service providers, like Singtel, differentiate AI infrastructure and services in an increasingly competitive market. The challenge is to provide meaningful control while ensuring compliance. The changing geopolitical scenario is pushing enterprises and organizations to opt for sovereign infrastructure for greater control and data localization. In addition, several countries have come up with regulations to ensure data localization. However, data localization is just one aspect of sovereign AI infrastructure. "Our definition of sovereignty is control. We want to retain control of our assets. Data localization is an important aspect of sovereignty. The other thing is the flexibility to choose different tools, vendors and solutions," Joseph said. On the other hand, sovereignty is complicated for international service providers, like BT. "Sovereignty and compliance are largely defined at the nation level and there is no common model that works across all countries yet. For international telecom groups, the challenge is to scale solutions developed for individual markets into products and offerings that can serve customers globally," said Andrew Bennett, CTO for AMEA at BT during a panel discussion at the same event. Read more about: Asia
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